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Global Melt

Very excited about this weekend’s inaugural Global Melt,a workshop for members and leaders of global peer-driven movements to explore what our movements have in common, share what we have learned, and discuss solutions and ideas for our respective communities.

We’ll be bringing together staff, board, and community members from organizations like Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, as well as Global Voices, KDE, P2PU, Open Design City, CiviCRM and many more fantastic projects.

Global Melt will be the beginning of more deliberate inter-organizational collaboration, of shared action plans, and shared resources. Our immediate goal is to troubleshoot one concrete issue that is common to all participating organizations. We will conclude the workshop with a deeper understanding of running local, community-organized events that contribute to organizational goals in meaningful and sustainable ways.

Participants are looking to develop tools that makes their work more efficient, more effective, and more impacting. Rather than building resources in isolation or continually investing in event strategies from scratch, we can gain more by pooling resources and ideas.

Possible shared resources include:

Local planner handbook – How can we communicate best practices to better inform and inspire local organizers?

Event calendars – How can we coordinate calendars of events from our organizations and community members?

Event and agenda formats – How can we learn about other event formats and adapt them to our purposes?

Facilitation practices – How can we grow the network of experienced, collaborative facilitators?

Documentation and communication platforms – What tools and methods are effective for documenting and promoting events?

Contact database – How can we map and connect community members and contributors across projects?

Evaluation of venues, vendors, and public partners – How can we collect organizational and logistical experiences from hosting events?

Event funding sources or templates – How can we generate resources to help local organizers bootstrap their events?

We’ve got a very rich collection of discussion questions to kick us off. We’re also keen to collect input from people who can’t attend in person (the workshop is still open — let me know if you want to join! There’s also a party on Monday, March 28.)

A taste of the agenda topics:

What do you gain from inter-organizational collaboration?

How do you balance grassroots values with global consistency?

How do you make events sustainable?

Addressing “The Language Challenge”: Building multilingual movements.

Parachuting into larger events.

What tools do you use for contact management, calendars, communication, translation, venue information, and documentation?

You can read more on our wiki and sign up on the discussion list. This event won’t be possible without the support of Mozilla, studio70, and all the stellar participants.